My activities as an artist began as a pre-teen drawing images and then stories and graphic novels (comics) as a teenager. My training as a painter began during my time at university when I was working towards a degree in Design. The few painting and drawing courses I took left me with instructors who were still reacting against the “confines” of academia.

By the time I had graduated, I was left with an aesthetic restlessness. I had no wish to quest after an “originality” that ultimately ended in some sterile intellectual game. I wanted to know how to paint. I wanted the foundational training that gave such grace and relevance to the work of my predecessors.

To this end I travelled to Italy and taught English. I had hoped to earn enough to enroll into one of the prestigious academies there only to end up doing the next best thing: copying the works of old masters in the best of environments. The disparity between what I had learned in my own study of art history and the immediacy of this new world of illusionist mastery was like a coming to life for me.

I returned to Ireland after a year spent in Italy and immediately set about the task of maintaining the discipline I had developed during my time in Florence. I drew from Bargue plates and painted constantly which ultimately led to my having gained entry into one of Dublin’s Galleries. It was only a few years later when an opportunity to attend the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto under the directorship of Fernando Friatas presented itself. There I learned and improved upon much of what my own self teaching could not supply.

For me the work is everything. There is a sublime poetry to be had in life and the complexity of its narratives and ideas, in the arrangement of a simple still life and the light that plays upon it during the day’s progress. I believe a good painting communicates this.

It occurs to me that an inability to faithfully render what is before us in the world will not only make what lies within the compass of our imagination an impossibility but compel the subject of our paintbrushes to resist revealing itself to us, not wishing to have its nature lost to the barbarity of accident and conceit.

Presently, I live in Spain with son painting day in and day out in the studio.